INTRODUCTION: BEHIND THE VEIL OF RESTORATION

To recover England's troubles it is necessary to re-enter an alien mental world. In this respect, as Robert Darnton reminds us: ‘the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry into an alien mentality.’ Our present distance from the perceptions and fears that underlay the troubles is more than simply the effect of the intervening three hundred years. It is politically created: the first and final imperative of restoration was forgetting.

The signs of this are everywhere. They are visible, not least, in English incomprehension in the face of the attitudes sustaining the last theatre of the troubles. That Northern Ireland's conflict has its origins in the seventeenth century is well enough understood. What is less frequently pointed out is that in the seventeenth century those troubles were English. It is then that we find the perceptions and language of that anti-hero Ian Paisley (a protestant enclave under encirclement, ‘popery’ whooping around the outside) in the mouths of England's heroes: John Pym, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Prince of Orange.